Re: My Debian Woody installation won't boot
Chris said:-
OK, so you'll be able to boot the installer if you add a couple more files
to your MacOS volume, namely root.bin and linux.bin from the CD. Then
.do the "boot hd:7,yaboot" and that will get you back in the installer.
Somehow, I guess your bootstrap partition doesn't get set up with the
yaboot file, yaboot.conf, and ofboot.b. You could verify this in the
installer by switching to console 2 (Alt-F2), and
mount -t hfs /dev/hda2 /mnt
ls /mnt
to see what's there. If mount gives you an error, then probably
the partition wasn't even initialized.
With the aid of the Complete Idiots Guide to Unix by Bill Wagner I
managed to try
ls -A -l /mnt
and got the following for the contents of /dev/hda2 (my 800K bootstrap)
8 .finderinfo
8 .resource
300 .rootinfo
2601 ofboot.b
150020 yaboot
470 yaboot.conf
(the sizes are in bytes not 512 byte chunks or strange Unix disc units)
umount /mnt
Switch back to the menu (Alt-F1), and run Make Hard Disk Bootable.
then switch back to console 2 and repeat the mount, see if stuff is
there now.
If it's not, that is totally strange. Maybe you can get more information
by running mkofboot manually:
cp /target/etc/yaboot.conf /etc/yaboot.conf
mkofboot -v
I have not dared to try mkofboot yet but Make System Bootable was the
option available - not Make Hard Disk Bootable. And then I was made
to mount the root and re-initialize the swap partition.
From the above it looks as though everything that should be on the
800K bootstrap is there, it just won't work!
FYI. It took three attempts to get Alt-F2 to work, press too early
and the install screen goes red and the keyboard locks up!
Next time the gurus do an install, do me a favour, pretend you are a
newbie and follow the documentation and see what happens!
DT - next attempt is Friday
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